Desperation
by c00ki3
Summary: The way of the ninja lies in barely-contained desperation. Because a desperate man is worth five men on the battlefield. KakaIru / Drabble


The way of the ninja lies in barely-contained desperation. Because a desperate man is worth five men on the battlefield – he is pushed down but gets up again and again and again, until his flesh has worn to bone and every muscle in his body can no longer move.

_Clothes are bothersome. Kakashi tries to get up but is pushed down again, the palm on his bandaged-wrapped chest burning him in not so much as pain as arousal. He smirks through his mask, and reaches out a hand to touch Iruka's lips, watching the man draw away confused. "I'm injured, you know," he tells Iruka, "please be gentle on me."_

Kakashi has seen generations upon generations of ninjas slain on the war front, and knows by sight the ones who are a step away from the Sanzu River. Death envelopes a ninja like a heavy cloak from the first breath he extinguishes till the last one he takes – signing on to the ninja academy is not so much becoming a hero as having a date with Enma.

But despite how Kakashi esteems himself to be beyond recklessness, he can't help but feel that peculiar desperation at his fingertips. A certain vitality for life burns in him like smoldering ember, trapped between layers of charcoal and dirt. Everyone precious to him has died. He doesn't intend to add anyone else to the list, and the only surefire way of doing so is to let no one close enough to qualify.

_Iruka remarks that Kakashi is a lonesome man, and Kakashi quirks his eyebrow and agrees._

Some small part of him razes with unjustifiable indignation at people like Naruto or Gai, whose spirits remains unbending to the harsh winds of reality. Kakashi knows it to be futile for him, for such displays of exuberance exhausts him. His own brand of vigor is much more sordid, and far more logical, in his opinion. Nothing goes better with blood than sex. Frenzied copulation on the battlefield is a given biological imperative.

Kakashi isn't so morally staunched to defile one-night stands or paid entourages, but books are easier. It's why he brings his Icha Icha series to his missions. It's why he re-reads them fervently as if living vicariously through them, twice, thrice and many more times to count.

Perhaps he found solace in them, some sort of universal solidarity in human perversion, some sort of confirmation that he's just as normal, if not even more so. The comfort isn't so much as physical as philosophical, and in Jiraiya's death there is no replacement. Like a drug addict whose pillbox is running empty, a subtle desperation is crawling under his skin, but Kakashi is vehement in denying it.

_Coming out of forced bed rest, Kakashi catches Iruka reading the second book of his Icha Icha collection: the signed copy that he had to tug at a few reluctant strings to get hold of. Normally the Sharigan user would follow up the discovery with a decidedly violent reaction, but the childish face before him is flushed as if in a fever. Kakashi sneaks up to the chunin and places his arms nonchalantly on Iruka's shoulders._

'Mind over Matter', he thinks, because if he can suppress his biological urges with nothing but words, than a little wavering is nothing. He simply has to find an alternative. Kakashi has no desire to live long – growing old with the one you love, having a family and all that means shit to him. When he had revived and woken up to a ruined Konoha, a vague sense of disappointment had overcame him, one that he promptly squashed and washed away, because accepting death and embracing it are two different things.

Iruka-sensei thinks Kakashi had saved him, but Kakashi knows that his actions were situational. He doesn't get the quiet gratitude that Iruka Umino graces him with, nor does he understand the chunin's interest in him. The invitations to Ichiraku Ramen Bar, once sparse and intermittent, have subtly increased. The conversational topics, previously limited to Team Seven (primarily Naruto), have expanded beyond strictly professional matters.

No, that's not true. It wasn't simply from the time after Pain's Invasion. Despite his usually guarded nature, Kakashi's mask has slipped in front of the academy instructor, and he didn't even know it. Gradually but surely, Iruka Umino is peeling him apart, layer by layer.

_Iruka-sensei can often be found at the local bathhouse on Friday nights after a long week of work. He joins the other instructors for their weekly obligatory dinner, and strolls around the park near the bathhouse until its patrons has filed out and he is more or less alone. The way Iruka Umino relaxes into the water, shoulders loosening and face uncreasing, Kakashi has unintentionally memorized even without his Sharingan. The back-story does not matter. Kakashi could have stumbled onto the man trying to wash away imaginary bloodstains on his own fingers, or perhaps it's a covert mission collecting information from suspected insurgents, it doesn't matter. The memory warps and clings onto his mind like a serpent he does not banish._

When they have meals together, Kakashi finishes quickly and lets Iruka leads the conversation while he slowly devours his ramen. Today's topic has inevitably, turned onto him, sooner than was expected. Kakashi wonders if Iruka-sensei hurls straight balls like this to his students as well – questions like 'Are you alright? You haven't been late recently.' or 'When's your birthday? I haven't seen you celebrating it at all…"

Kakashi is skilled at evading questions with learned cavalier. The cogs of his brains turn lightning-quick but even he can be startled sometimes. Iruka isn't forward (it just isn't the right word), but he can be unrelenting beneath the easy-going manner. So when Iruka dips into his life as if testing the waters, Kakashi thinks it infuriating. He isn't a social experiment to be tamed, nor a title to be admired (Konoha's White Fang, Copy Ninja Kakashi, Hokage candidate: Kakashi feels burdened because none of these ascension were by his efforts alone). But more than that, Kakashi cannot read Iruka's intentions, and that notion alone stills his soul, makes his mind sharp, calculative.

Even so, Kakashi cannot deny that Iruka has no bad intentions. That man lives in a world of white and gray morality. Like Naruto, he thinks that people can be redeemed, are worth redeeming, and sympathizes too easily. He subsists on the moral code of forgiving and forgetting, and has lived too long in the company of sheep that he can no longer succeed in turning into a wolf. It's why Iruka has always remained a chunin, an academy instructor (genial compared to the job of an ANBU, though both considered ninjas), despite his admittedly understated but proficient abilities.

Kakashi cannot trust himself to feel. He fears that, if he does so, the results will be irreversible. Cautious but insouciant, somberness and casualness all mixed together – Kakashi holds himself lightly above the world, as if he is languidly floating on water, but in reality he is simply afraid to drown.

_When Iruka wakes him from a nightmare, the first thing Kakashi did was to plant a kunai deep in his colleague's shoulder, narrowly missing the jugular vein (because even before his mind is roused, his muscles has remembered the action). Iruka doesn't move, simply gives him a tight smile Kakashi thought was reserved only for the Kyuubi's vessel, and instead of apologizing, Kakashi simply plucks the kunai out from the wound and says, "Well, looks like I'm pretty lethal in bed, after all." The blood flows liberally onto the sheets, and what Kakashi is thinking at the moment is how ironic that it is almost never his own blood on the sheets._

Kakashi is an ANBU through and through. He thrives in the nihilism and dark thrill of assassination and torture. He isn't a sadist per se, but the rules are simple there – the strongest dog survives. Like leashed pit bulls, they would turn on each other given enough reason and opportunity, but would never have either to do so, and Kakashi found that he didn't hate living in a world like that. It meant he didn't have to ruminate over things like potential betrayals or hijinking the missions to save a comrade, because everyone here could handle their own. And if it were otherwise, everyone was just a faceless mask, a nameless voice.

_Iruka is neither faceless nor voiceless. Kakashi can imagine but never consummate, because Iruka is guileless (innocent isn't the right word, but it comes to mind). In the same way he had pulled himself away from the ANBU, Kakashi tears his imagination from the all-consuming thoughts of Iruka, because even if he acknowledges that he is no hero, he cannot bring himself to take that one step off the cliff either._

Kakashi does not mind getting his hands dirty, enjoys the challenge even, and stepping into the shadow of Konoha, like slipping into the dark side of the moon, was somehow tranquil for his mind. He is able to justify his actions because he believes in Konoha, in solidarity, in comrades and teamwork. For the higher cause of the village, anything is possible, be it sending children to the frontlines or killing the innocent. Kakashi's mind is like an undisturbed lake, deep and still on the surface, and it is only through his cyclical logic that he remains disaffected and sane.

Iruka however, picks at straws to twine the both of them together. He seems to want to think that they are similar creatures – both of them lost their parents at a young age to unfortunate circumstances, both of them are around the same age, and both are directly taking charge over the volatile Nine-Tailed Kitsune.

And more than anything Iruka trusts him implicitly, even when the other instructors were apprehensive about putting the inexperienced Kakashi over Team Seven (with its Uchiha survivor and Fox Demon). Kakashi wants to think that it's because Iruka trusts easily, but Kakashi knows better than that. Years spent around the de facto caretaker of Naruto have made him aware that Iruka doesn't let just anyone close. He is open yet restrained, and like birds of the same species flocking together for warmth, the chunin specifically selects those who are flawed.

_Kakashi doesn't expose Iruka's own isolation for fear that Iruka would withdraw slowly, like a blade of mimosa closing in on itself._

Kakashi is tired. He is tired of threading around this porcelain strawman who's both resolute and fragile. He is tired of overanalyzing their conversations and deconstructing Iruka's psychological wellbeing because he knows, after years upon years of experience, that his gut instinct is always correct.

The gnawing in his stomach, and the knot in his chest – that's not a prepubescent crush. It's something deeper and wilder than that. Kakashi has no moral qualms over using a colleague for his own self-satisfaction, but he knows instinctively that it will never be enough.

How many years does it need to be? Five years? Six?

The desperation runs beneath his skin like streams seeking for tributaries, seeking for release, into blue star-filled oceans. Whenever Kakashi returns to the village injured, his left eye pulsing along with his off-beat heart, Iruka drops by his ward with a warm smile and soft hazel eyes (Kakashi can find nothing but clichés to describe Iruka's rather ordinary features).

_Slower, slower, slower._

Iruka seeks him out at Obito's memorial site. There's no coffin beneath the inscription because Obito's body was never retrieved, and it is only a symbol. But just as Iruka forgives and forgets, Kakashi does the inverse. His life is devoted in remembrance, a lifelong mourning, a symbol in itself.

Iruka reaches him lightly, with elusive touches and honest whispered words. This time, Kakashi finds himself dulled by fading pain and cannot find it in himself to reply. In all honesty he is only afraid to let go, because all he has to prove his existence is a whitewashed memory, and Iruka understands.

The chunin has figured out the date of the anniversary, of all things. The town is bustling below them, content and oblivious and foolhardy. And the sun beats down warmly on them. Kakashi can feel the grass between his knuckles and is aware of the fingertips resting carefully between his shoulder blades. His mind does not turn; its clockwork does not reel. There is simply silence, as if the world has frozen over and is reduced to nothing but white.

The peace is unfettered and reassuring, but Kakashi is torn.

Between passion and rationality, he falters and rolls to a stop. Waiting, biding his time, even as the undercurrent of impatience nibs at him and the blood and death around him reminds him of his own mortality. Impermanence.

But desperate ninjas don't make good partners. Kakashi can wait.

Slowly.


End file.
